Re:Better Than Raising the Minimum Wage: Expand the Earned I...
by graycat on Sunday May 24, 2015 @12:05AM
(#9595270)
Good point.
For your
> You're looking at the wrong pot of money.
I was responding to the common claim that the worker bees are poor because the suits get too much money.
Your example would be really something for Apple Computer with, what is it, $195 billion in cash?
Let's take Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) as an example because, conveniently, their CEO made ~$50M in 2013. [1] Their annual earnings report indicates that they had a net income of $1.04B that year, and their corporate profile suggests they have ~60,000 employees. [2][3] If they spent 100% of their current profits on employee salaries it would yield ~$17k/employee. (For reference, the full-time minimum wage salary in 2013 was $15,080. [4]) Even under much more reasonable conditions -- let's say that we allocate 1/4 of net income to worker salaries -- then each of their 60,000 workers would earn an additional $3800, which is just about equal to the max EITC for a family with one child in 2013. [5]
It's really not about CEOs getting paid huge amounts, it's that workers are neither represented nor included in sharing the prosperity of their labor -- and taxpayers are subsidizing the difference.
[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/06/04/bed-...
[2] http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/bbby/financials
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=BBBY+Profile
[4] http://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers-poverty-...
[5] http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/2013-EITC-Income-Limits,-Maxi...